Generative
literature, defined as the production of
continuously changing literary texts by means of a
specific dictionary, some set of rules and the use
of algorithms, is a very specific form of digital
literature which is completely changing most of the
concepts of classical literature. Texts being
produced by a computer and not written by an
author, require indeed a very special way of
engrammation and, in consequence, also point to a
specific way of reading particularly concerning all
the aspects of the literary time. In my paper, I
will try to present some of the characteristics of
generative texts and their consequences for the
conception of literature itself.
I call "engrammation" the adaptation of expression
wills to the technical constraints of the medium
used for its mediatisation. For instance, a book
needs a fixed writing, and the mediatisation by
means of a screen needs other modalities of
presentation.

I call “generative
literature” a literature where the texts are produced
through a computer by means of a set of formal rules, the
use of any kind of algorithm, specific dictionaries and
eventually knowledge representations. That means a
literature of which the author does not write the final
texts but which only works at the level of the high rank
components such as: conceptual models, knowledge rules,
dictionary entries and rhetoric definitions. A text without
an author generally seems to be out of question. Such a
designation seems to describe an impossible literature
because, despite the fact we generally assume that there is
a very strong link between a text and its author, in this
case the author is separated from the text. In generative
literature, there certainly also is an author but one who
has not really written the text which is being presented to
a reader, his function is not the one we usually assign to
an author. The difference is: this author is something like
a meta-author trying to define what literature is for him
and how his literary conception can be formally described.
The tools of engrammation he uses are totally
different.But at the end of the process there
are also texts.For example:
Text 1:“Poursuite du bonheur... Peu de
choses laissent des traces: pourtant il s'agit bien
quelquefois de vivre; ses souvenirs brûlent
Jeanne-la-voleuse comme des flammes - le soleil cogne: les
dieux passent par rafales; les carrefours sont des arbres de
vie, la lumière dévaste les villas... Les
spirales des avenues trouent Montreuil: qu'a fait Jeanne du
temps qui lui a été donné...”

These two texts were produced by the
generator used in my Internet novel
Fictions
(fiction)[1]
the title of which has a double meaning: It both connotes
that all fiction is a fiction by itself and that a fiction
can be built by an infinite number of fictions, something
like a “mise en abyme” of the fiction itself.
Indeed none of these texts will ever be presented to the
reader for a second time and no reader will ever have the
same set of texts. Each text seems to be independent from
the others.Such a situation seems to be rather
natural for poetry. For example:

For poetry indeed, each text is something
like an island isolated from the other ones even when they
are published in the same book of poetry. A poem is a text
by itself, each poem is entirely closed and supported by
itself. But none of these texts will ever be read by any
other reader unless, as here, they are printed as examples
by way of exception but generative texts usually do not
require to be printed. And even in that case, the reception
of generative poetry is really different from the reception
of non-generative poetry.
But, in this paper, I will speak about generative
narratives, not about generative poetry, the concepts and
approaches of which are undeniably rather different.
Everybody knows Gérard Genette's classical definition
of narrative (Narrative Discourse, 1972): a
narrative is a text built on a diegetic axis, what
he calls diegesis. That implies that any text has a
beginning and an end. Whatever games would be played on the
diegetic axis, it undeniably is the basic structure
of the narrative. All the episodes of the narrative are
organised along that structure. Such a situation is strongly
underlined by the kind of medium which has usually been used
to materialise the narrative: the book. A book always has a
first page and a last one and all the reading is done by
taking into account this constraint. We all know that. This
does not imply that a reader cannot read back, but we also
know that such an action is an exception from the rule and
rather is an approach of researchers than that of an
ordinary reader. Hence it is the diegetic axis
which structures all the conceptions of novels or short
stories and a reading cannot stop at any point of that axis,
more precisely, if a reading does stop at some point it is
to let the reader dream or think about what he has just
read, it is like an halt during the reading process.
The generative conception of narrative completely renovates
such a situation. In a generative novel indeed there is an
equivalence principle at every point of the narrative which
is dependant on generation. At these points a text is only a
temporary specimen of an infinite family of virtual texts.
In concrete terms, this means that any point of the
generative axis is the theoretical point of an infinity of
texts and I propose to call that situation “alepsis”
because at that point, the arrow of the diegetic
axis is broken up for a while. In general, the
diegesis includes all the events that allegedly
have occurred, including actions and spaces not explicitly
described, most of them are however offered or suggested to
the reading in the book. In generative fiction, at the
contrary, most of the texts will never be offered to the
reading: most of the diegesis markers are latent
ones. The two texts quoted above, for example, are not
topologically situated on the diegetic axis one
before the other but are produced for the same point of that
axis: that signifies that they are — from a narrative
point of view — completely equivalent: one may be read
instead of the other. More than that there is — at
this point — an innumerable number of virtual texts
but, however, each of them has a function within the
narrative process: they can be read or not (depending on the
possibility of generation) but if they are being read, they
offer a new view onto the narrative; if they are not being
read, the reader does not miss them. One text can then be
read as an alternative for all the others but it can also be
read before or after one another. There is, on that point,
no obligation.

I am not talking of prolepsis (anticipation) or
analepsis (back reading) which are the two main
rhetorical tools used by a writer to build his story.
Because prolepsis and analepsis can only
be understood from the perspective of linear reading. There
is neither prolepsis nor analepsis in the
reading, the reading is linear and always backwards:
prolepsis and analepsis are only writing
games, engrammation procedures, playing with the arrow of
time. In that case, the classical literary theory adopts the
writer's point of view, not the reader's, it supposes that
the diegetic axis can be cut in parts which can be
easily displaced on it. Hence each story appears to be a
combination of smaller stories which have a kind of
independence from each other except from the
diegesis point of view. Indeed, these fragments may
not change in their form and once they have been given to
the reader they are located on the arrow of time forever;
they can not be displaced and thus the game is very
different for the writer and for the reader: the reception
of the text is fixed whereas this was not the case during
its production.

The fact that in a generative narrative
such a constraint was given up has introduced a great
liberty: when a reader obtains a text, he obtains that text
at a certain moment of his reading but he has no idea of
what other text he could obtain at the same moment of
another reading. He cannot tell if the text is directly
related to the previous or the next one (in terms of reading
time). The relation between one text and another can be a
relation situated on the diegetic axis but it can
also be any other kind of relation. For example, that text
can be another concretion of the virtualities of the same
model of text, i.e. an alepsis, a text not situated
in a relation of time to the previous one.

In that case — and this certainly is one of the
reasons why generative texts disturb our reading habits —
the reader loses all the usual markers relating to the
diegetic axis and has to find or invent other kinds
of references. The narrative is not totally built in advance
but put together from a lot of virtualities which are —
or are not — actualizing themselves in the course of
reading. That reading course is then fundamental and tends
to substitute itself to the diegetic axis. Each new
reading — actualizing the narrative in a new way,
built on what I call microfictions — creates
its own diegesis which is not a predetermined but
an undetermined diegetic axis. That really means:
Any reader A needs to develop a unique hypothesis which
gives him an idea of the narrative which isdifferent from that of any reader B. Maybe
he can be sure that his conception of the time in that
narrative will be true if he can read all the virtual texts
but that is completely impossible. The only indicators he
can use for that are those given by each
microfiction: each of them seems to be built on the
basis of a local diegesis which then, for the
reader, are necessarily related to a more general one. What
is more important than the building of a diegetic axis
by one author then, are the various images the reader
always builds of a possible moving diegesis: the
diegetic axis is totally virtual and can only be
built by the readers’ strategy which is something like
a translepsis, an infinitely moving hypothesis of
diegetic relations. It is what I call the “hologrammatic
principle”: each text contains the entire time of
all possible texts. There is no concrete diegetic
axis but only a virtual one much more related to the
reading than to the writing. The narrative does neither need
beginning nor end because the narration is entirely built by
each reading of each text: one novel can thus be constituted
by one or an infinite number of texts and no reader reads
the same number of it. There is no structure of the
narrative, only an idea of a virtual one built by the
reading itself.

For the author, that situation is very interesting because
he is free from the necessity of mainly conceiving a
narrative in relation with time and he does not have to
respect a linear form of engrammation. This opens up a new
field of creativity: he has to think about and to work on
all the virtualities implied by the generative fiction,
time, even if by tradition it is a very important one, is
only one of them. A narrative is not obliged to have an
beginning and one end: Each generative narrative is made of
an infinite number of equal alepsis and it is not
obligatory that time relations are initially stated between
them. In Fictions
(fiction) for example, each text is totally independent
from the others; in Trajectoires,
the texts are quite independent apart from the fact that the
interface design by using a set of symbolic numbers leads
the reader to imagine a form of diegesis. In that
case, the design interface is a procedure
oftime
engrammation.It is definitely enough
that the reader knows that he is reading a narrative because
– due to his cultural concept of narrative – he tries to
find diegesis markers. Hence a novel can be totally
built on an infinite present as in Fictions
(fiction), the reader builds a diegesis from
its translepsis course himself. Thus generative
literature demonstrates that the writer's control of the
diegesis is not necessary because diegesis is a
cognitive concept of reception: we always imagine stories on
a time axis and even if a narrative has neither beginning
nor end, we as readers always imagine them. Generative
literature opens up a creative field for a renewal of
narration. Without a doubt, the book as a product of a dated
technology using fixed engrammation procedures has become a
reductive matrix that we have to reform; to liberate the
text from the linearity and the determination of its pages,
to allow text to reveal itself by other means, in other
contexts with other possibilities of expression. Hence
literature is not dependent on the medium of the book any
longer but can also use other media such as any kind of
screens, cellular phones or computer networks. Thus there is
no more necessity of sticking to linear forms. What
generative literature wants to affirm today is the vital and
infinite power of the “literary” communication
as a dynamic diffraction of relations, where the
always-different text manifests its identities only through
the infinite repetitions of its generation of the same,
through its infinite changes more than through its halts.
What this process assumes is the fecundating power of
language as it enriches itself within all the restraining
particularities of any given context. It is this fecundating
power of language upon which the receiving subject
continually renews him- or herself.

At first approach, the generative text indeed demolishes all
the material references that are the basis of the reader's “preparation”:
the physical appearances of the book (volume, thickness,
division into paragraphs and chapters, and so on). Instead a
radically new literature, putting the diegetic axis into the
background, has to invent new forms of fiction, new forms of
stories, new forms of narration when using other media than
the book. A “generative novel” is thus forced to
invent all its codes. Generative literature wants first of
all to be something like a “literarization” of
technology, because what it demonstrates first and foremost
in its multiplicities and its variations, are its potentials
and its changing states. Even if that situation is not
absolutely new in literary history, where the eagerness to
present texts with new technical apparatus has always
existed, at least in the margins, the digitalization of its
technology has created a significantly new situation for
literature: the immediacy of its generation and its
infinitude set on stage the formalisms from which the texts
come forth. The relation of the subject to his or her
writing is thus a new relation to time, and the functional
concept of authorship itself is to be entirely redefined,
because what matters more than anything else is the “historical”
memory of forms and their displacement. There is no end to
writing and reading but a generative text can infinitely be
continued. The person who we can only call a “digital
author” as long as there is a lack of more accurate
terms does not need to deny tradition by means of a radical
modernity but requires of it something like a new reading,
or, at least, an unheard one. Generative literature's only
pretension is to enrich the text's potentialities. It
forsakes the fiction of fiction to be only interested in the
subjective production and formalization of meaning. In that
sense, it only exists through infinite literary production.
Generative text rejects clotting, time's dictatorial
caricature; it presents a whim of eternity. But this
eternity-whim truly differs from that of “classical”
literature because it does not depend on the duration of its
memory but on the infinitude of its reproductions.

Out of the book, displayed on screens or, by various
technical processes, on any object henceforth used as a
displaying surface, text, now able to become time and space,
completely changes its nature. It becomes picture-text,
sometimes even text-universe or performing-text. That old
temptation, outlined in several historical attempts, now
finds its fulfilment thanks to the possibilities that
computerization allows.

According to George Steiner[3],
the comprehension of modern art requires the acceptance of
the fading of any conception of “culture” as
having an immanent value, necessarily linked to hierarchical
societies, and its replacement with a set of “cultures,”
all regarded as equal. The computer culture, in that sense,
is an absolutely new and absolutely up-to-date writing tool
inventing new engrammation modalities.

Generative literature does not make any claim to the
intangible and almost-divine universality of pre-generative
literature, in which the only active role left is in the
production of new glosses; it merely wants to be the
ephemeral and temporary moment of a common literarity,
revealing itself only in the instant of the creative
stimulus.
More than ever before, a text is more dependent on its media
contexts nowadays. Every surface may be used as medium for
texts, not only sheets of paper but also all sorts of
'screens' which can be a mountain, a building, a screen of a
cellular phone, a person's body etc. Classical culture
originates from a bet on transcendence: “Art and
mind looks toward what is not yet here, at the accepted risk
of being ignored by the living.”[4]
Classical culture is produced only for museums, for “conservation,”
and thus is opposed to ephemeral consummation. The classical
production of writings is aimed entirely at archives. To
that way of thinking, the slightest “loss” is
considered a cultural tragedy. Any destroyed manuscript is a
burning library; the obliteration of any draft scribbled on
a tabletop seems a disaster. Against that museum art, that
library-and-dust art, generative writing is an art of
consummation which refuses to look back on its tracks, which
it regards as nothing more than signs turned toward
something else.

Real-time generative text, which exists only by its
instantaneity, first of all fights against all this: “Everywhere
the virus of potentiality prevails. Carrying us away toward
a rapture which is also that of unresponsiveness.”[5]
But the unresponsiveness that Baudrillard fears is, in fact,
a positive one because it is unresponsive to an external
hierarchy of values, to a culture of reverence.

"The public is no longer the wise echo of talent,
something like a referee and relay in transmission of an
atypical attempt; it associates itself to the artistic
elaboration inside of a set of sometimes uninhibited
energies".[6]

The text, no longer regarded as "literary", now has to
annihilate all reverence because a generative text can
always be substituted by another one. Hence it is not the
singular display which is at the heart of generative
literature but rather the movement, the series of
ever-changing displays of text. The computer culture is
close to spreading, to dispersion. It introduces a new
relation to memory, no longer “reminding” but —
because a text, read at a given moment, is nothing other
than an image of another text read at another moment with
which it maintains links of dependence and independence, at
once diffracted and refractory — rebuilding
remembrance, active participation by the reader lies in its
elaboration. Displaying on its screens the vanishing of the
master, of eternity's claims, generative literature engages
the reader as a culture in itself.
Like all new literary approaches, generative literature must
first struggle with that resistance within itself, to find
the ways that are peculiar to it by rejecting, even
sometimes at the cost of provocation and error, at the risk
of becoming illegible, what is inside it, enclosing itself
within the gummy thickness of its moments of arrest.

While strongly individualist, the contemporary spirit is
also gregarious, taking pleasure in the instantaneity of
shared time, where the contemporary spirit formerly was
collective inside the unchangeable cultural spiritual union.
Generative literature tries to be on the side of the
effusive superficiality of show. It wants to reconcile the
literary activity with that of play and game: to separate
literature from the sphere of reverential and deadly
seriousness in which the whole classical tradition locks it.
Not merely about a particular text, it questions itself
infinitely about the aesthetic working of the human
spirit.[7]